The Trump administration on Friday returned to the Supreme Court to again ask the justices to allow the removal of protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States without risk of deportation under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.
The case will be familiar to the justices. In May they temporarily paused a federal trial judge’s earlier order in the case, over the noted dissent of only one member of the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The trial judge, Edward M. Chen of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, had blocked the administration’s efforts to remove the protections while the case moved forward.
The majority opinion in May, which was unsigned, gave no reasons. Nor did Justice Jackson’s dissent.
The case then returned to Judge Chen, who in September again ruled in favor of the challengers after receiving additional evidence. He said he was not bound by the Supreme Court’s order in May, noting that it “did not provide any specific analysis.”
In his emergency application asking the Supreme Court to pause that second ruling, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said that Judge Chen’s actions were another example of “the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket.”
Citing a recent concurring opinion from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch chastising federal trial judges for what he said was defiance of the Supreme Court, Mr. Sauer wrote that “lower courts cannot treat this court’s orders as good for only one stage of only one case by gesturing at irrelevant distinctions, subjectively grading the persuasiveness of the court’s perceived reasoning or faulting the court’s terseness.”
The court’s emergency docket, which critics call the “shadow docket,” uses truncated procedures that tend to produce terse provisional orders, ruling only on whether a policy can be implemented while its legality is being litigated. The justices often do not include an explanation of how they arrived at these decisions, making it difficult for lower courts to parse whether and how the orders amount to binding precedent.
The case involving the Venezuelans started in February, when Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, terminated an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status that had been granted to Venezuelans by the Biden administration. People affected by the change sued, saying that the move violated administrative procedures and was influenced by racial bias.
The Temporary Protected Status program, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, allows migrants from nations that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instabilities to live and work legally in the United States.
Mr. Trump has tried to end protections under the program as he seeks to make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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